Peo­ple ask me: Why do you write about food, and eat­ing and drink­ing? Why don’t you write about the strug­gle for pow­er and secu­ri­ty, and about love, the way oth­ers do?

They ask it accus­ing­ly, as if I were some­how gross, unfaith­ful to the hon­or of my craft.

The eas­i­est answer is to say that, like most oth­er humans, I am hun­gry.

But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and secu­ri­ty and love, are so mixed and min­gled and entwined that we can­not straight­ly think of one with­out the oth­ers. So it hap­pens that when I write of hunger, I am real­ly writ­ing about love and the hunger for it … and then the warmth and rich­ness and fine real­i­ty of hunger sat­is­fied … and it is all one.